Download PDF | Ruth Macrides - History as Literature in Byzantium_ Papers from the Fortieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, April 2007-Routledge (2016).
351 Pages
Foreword
The contributions to this book derive from papers presented to the Fortieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies on ‘Byzantine History as Literature’, held in Birmingham, 13–16 April 2007. Participants from three continents converged on the original home of symposia where, for once, truly spring-like weather conditions held, so that the daffodils blossomed in record time.
The symposium coincided with the annual Classical Association meeting, as it had done 28 years earlier when Margaret Mullett and Roger Scott organized the Thirteenth Spring Symposium, from which Byzantium and the Classical Tradition emerged. That was still a time when every symposium met in Birmingham but not every symposium resulted in an edited book. To commemorate that earlier convergence of classicists and Byzantinists, Margaret Mullett addressed the 2007 joint meeting with ‘History and truth, lies and fiction: Byzantium and the classical tradition, twentyfive years on’. The symposium theme was divided into four sessions, each named after a prominent man or woman who has made pronouncements on literature and/or historical writing: David Lodge, Anna Komnene, Henry Ford and Steven Runciman. Fourteen speakers examined classicizing histories and chronicles from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries, asking questions about audience and aesthetics, narrative and narrator, stories and their reinterpretations and reconfigurations. Eighteen communications were given on topics related to the symposium theme. Some of these speakers were also Birmingham student assistants who took care of all manner of needs, with smooth efficiency. The symposium certainly could not have taken place without the kind and generous support of a host of institutions and individuals. It is a pleasure to acknowledge their sponsorship here and thank the AHRC (doctoral training funds), Ashgate Publishing and Variorum, the British Academy, the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation, the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture, Nicholas and Matrona Egon, the Greek Ministry of Culture, the Hellenic Foundation, the Hellenic Society, the A. G. Leventis Foundation, Oxford University Press, the St Hilary Trust.
Warm thanks are due to John Smedley and Kirsten Weissenberg of Ashgate Publishing, for their exemplary support throughout the editorial process, and Rowena Loverance, series editor and head of the Publications CommiĴee of the SPBS. Ruth Macrides Birmingham, September 2009
Editor’s Preface
The words ‘history’ and ‘literature’ have been appearing in close association with each other with greater frequency in Byzantine studies over the last decade.1 Although it has been the case that Byzantinists have always treated ‘the literature of the empire as a body of historical source material’, they have not always treated their historical source material as literature.2 In 1990 Margaret MulleĴ wrote that it was rare for ‘literature’ to be given a section of its own at symposia and congresses, although she thought that historiography was an exception – ‘it should now be the best understood area of Byzantine literature’.3 The emphasis here is on ‘should’. ‘Still’ is another word that must be emphasized. The literary analysis of historical works, chronographies and historiographies, is still in its early days for Byzantine studies. The literary dimension of historical writing is still considered the domain of others. The historian’s work, it is thought, lies elsewhere, in the accumulation and corroboration of information about the past. Even though ‘historiography was cut away from the branches of literature’4 relatively recently, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and made a discipline only then, we like to impute to medieval authors and medieval historiography characteristics of our own times – history as a discrete discipline of learning, and the historian’s goal as that of uncovering, recording and explaining the past. Likewise we understand ‘literature’ to be separate and separable from history. Literature does not make for good history; it lacks ‘the seriousness of truthful historiography’.5 We expect Byzantine authors of historical texts to be like us: serious, hardworking scholars.6 But we have double standards. When, at times, they are like us, we refuse to admit it.
Ingela Nilsson has pointed to techniques in our historical writing that we consider flaws in theirs: repetition of material taken from other sources is plagiarism in them or at the very least a lack of originality; in modern historical writing ‘the sheer habit of repetition makes certain things come “true”, so that the historian no longer has to prove them’. When our Byzantine authors deploy rhetorical methods, when they praise or blame or write to display their strengths as writers, we criticize their ‘bias’. Yet modern historians also introduce their preferences and approaches in their works but do not recognize these as bias.7 Binary classifications abound; although they have outlived their usefulness, they are still with us: history vs. literature, truth vs. fiction, classicizing histories vs. popularizing chronicles, high-level Greek vs. the vernacular. It is still not uncommon to see Hans Georg Beck’s ‘Mönkschronik’ article of 1965 cited approvingly but, in the very next sentence, overlooked without even a blush.8 The features of Byzantine historical writing that are well known from the classical tradition in history writing, the very elements that gave Byzantine historical writing a high reputation as the most impressive literary achievement of Byzantine culture, are also held to be responsible for the ‘distorting mirror’ effect: they prevent their authors from portraying their own world and hinder modern historians in their efforts to reconstruct that world.9
At best these are ‘embellishments’ that need to be stripped from the text so the core can be revealed, the core that alone is of value and interest. Literary critics have shown, on the contrary, that these ‘embellishments’ are ‘facts’ about the text, as useful to our understanding and knowledge of the past as the other facts we are more keen to collect.10 Yet, as a whole, historians of Byzantium are still not won over. Although we have perhaps stopped despising many, if not most, of the elements of Byzantine historical texts that have traditionally been considered intrusive and unhelpful – classicizing language, figures of speech, topoi, mimesis – we have not yet been persuaded of the need to undertake literary analyses of the works that are the backbone and substance of our own narratives.
Texts are still edited and translated with no discussion given to their method of composition. Meanwhile, although chronicles are not impaired by all of the features of classicizing histories, they are not deemed worthy of literary analysis, since they are considered to lack literary pretension. History is literature. The papers published here demonstrate what we can learn about Byzantium through literary readings of many of the main Byzantine historical texts of the sixth- to the fourteenth century and by an examination of the illustrated narratives of the twelĞh- and fourteenth century. The work presented in this volume is fundamental to the further study of the main narratives of Byzantine history. For some, history studied as literature can be an end in itself. For others, it will be a means of determining how our knowledge of the past changes when the historical sources are read as literature.
List of Contributors
Dmitry Afinogenov is a professor at Moscow University, where he teaches Byzantine Greek and the history of Byzantine literature while he also does research for the Russian Academy of Sciences. His main fields of interest are Byzantine historiography and hagiography, especially of the Iconoclast period, the interrelation of various texts from the so-called Dark Ages and the survival of lost Byzantine sources in Church Slavonic translations. He has also wriĴen several papers on Byzantine literary theory. A number of his publications deal with the restoration of image worship in 843 and its protagonists. Athanasios Angelou is at present Dean of the Arts Faculty at the University of Ioannina, where he teaches Byzantine literature. Previously he taught at Royal Holloway and Kings College London. He has published the following texts: Refutation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology by Nicholas of Methone (Athens/Leiden, 1984), and Dialogue with the Empress-Mother on Marriage by Manuel Palaiologos (Vienna, 1991). His other publications include articles on Byzantine intellectual history, focused on the views of Scholarios on Hellenic identity and the Fall of Constantinople. He has been Artistic Director of a series of cultural events centred on Byzantium, among which were a concert including Syrian chant with Guy Protheroe in St Paul’s Cathedral, London (1998); Versioni del Sacro in San Marco, Venice (2001); Voix de Byzance in Brussels (2003); and a performance of music and readings at the Megaron, Athens (2006).
Elena N. Boeck is Associate Professor of Art History at DePaul University. Her current book project investigates the rise of illustrated histories in the Mediterranean world from the twelĞh through the fourteenth centuries and explores the ideological motivations for visualizing history in Sicily, Bulgaria and Rus. George T. Calofonos is a Byzantine historian, educated at the Centre for Byzantine, OĴoman and Modern Greek, Birmingham, specializing in the study of Late Antique and Byzantine dreaming. He has published on a variety of related subjects including dream theory, oneirokritika, incubation, dreams in historiography and hagiography, magic. A research associate of the Institute of Byzantine Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens, he has contributed to the programme ‘Dreaming in Byzantium: a database of dream-reports in Byzantine literature’ and is co-editing, with Christine Angelidi, the forthcoming proceedings of the conference ‘Dreams and Visions in Late Antiquity and Byzantium’. He is currently working on his book Dream Divination in Byzantium: A Pagan Art in Christian Context. Brian Croke is Executive Director of the Catholic Education Commission, Sydney, as well as Adjunct Professor of History at Macquarie University and an Honorary Associate of the University of Sydney. He is the author of several articles and books on early Byzantine history and historiography, including History and Historians in Late Antiquity with A.M. EmmeĴ (1983), Studies in John Malalas with E. Jeffreys and R. ScoĴ (1990), Christian Chronicles and Byzantine History (1992), The Chronicle of Marcellinus: Translation and Commentary (1995), and Count Marcellinus (2001).
John Davis is a translation adviser at National Bank of Greece, Athens, while he also teaches a translation seminar at Athens University. He gained his PhD in Byzantine Philology from the University of Ioannina. He has published translations of contemporary Greek poetry as well as of an ekphrasis On Spring by Emperor Manuel Palaiologos. He hopes before long to complete for publication his critical edition of the fourteenthcentury metaphrase of Niketas Choniates’ History. Stephanos EĞhymiadis is Associate Professor at the Open University of Cyprus. He has published numerous studies on Byzantine hagiography, historiography and prosopography. He is the co-editor of Niketas Choniates: a Historian and a Writer (Pomme d’Or, Geneva, 2009), and is currently preparing a collective handbook on Byzantine hagiography. Martin Hinterberger is Associate Professor of Byzantine Philology at the University of Cyprus. His research focuses on emotions in Byzantine literature, the language of Byzantine literature, as well as on autobiography and hagiography. He is currently working on a book about Phthonos in Byzantine literature.
Michael Jeffreys was trained as a classicist at Cambridge but wrote a London University PhD on the borders of Byzantium and Modern Greek. Most of his career was spent teaching Modern Greek to the children and grandchildren of Greek migrants in Sydney, Australia, where he became the Sir Nicholas Laurantus Professor at Sydney University. On returning to Britain with the new millennium he has turned to Byzantium, becoming the research manager for the continuing Prosopography of the Byzantine World project, published as a huge online database. Most of his articles concern the period from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, but he has published a translation of the chronicle of John Malalas and a scaĴering of contributions to the literary and political history of Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University. His studies on the reception of classical culture in Byzantium recently culminated in two monographs, Hellenism in Byzantium (2007) and The Christian Parthenon (2009). He has also translated many Byzantine authors into English, among them Hesychios, Genesios, Psellos and Prokopios (forthcoming). Ruth Macrides is Senior Lecturer in Byzantine Studies at the Centre for Byzantine, OĴoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham. She has edited and translated Byzantine legal texts, collected in Kinship and Justice in Byzantium, 11th–15th centuries (1999), and has published a translation and study of George Akropolites’ History (2007). Among her articles are studies of Byzantine historical writing. At present she is working on late Byzantine ceremonial and preparing a study of PseudoKodinos’ work on court hierarchy and ceremony. Paolo Odorico is Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is engaged in research on the history and the social context of Byzantine literature. His publications, which include editions of texts and their interpretation, range from early Byzantium to the OĴoman period. Among his publications are Il prato e l’ape (Vienna, 1986), Digenis Akritas (Florence, 1995), Conseils et Mémoires de Synadinos (Paris, 1996), Le codex B de Saint-Jean-Prodrome de Serres (Paris, 1998), L’Akrite (Toulouse, 2002), Nicandre de Corcyre, Le voyage d’Occident (Toulouse, 2003), and Thessalonique, chroniques d’une ville prise (Toulouse, 2005).
Stratis Papaioannou is William A. Dyer, Jr. Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Dumbarton Oaks Assistant Professor of Byzantine Studies at Brown University. He works on Byzantine literary aesthetics, epistolography, and concepts of self and desire. He is preparing a booklength study on medieval Greek self-representations, with an emphasis on Michael Psellos, while also working on an edition and translation of Psellos’ leĴers. Roger ScoĴ retired from the University of Melbourne at the end of 2003 as Reader in Classics and is currently Principal Fellow in the School of Historical Studies. He is a former president of the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies. His main work has been on Byzantine chronicles notably a translation and study of Malalas with an Australian group and a translation and commentary on Theophanes with Cyril Mango.
Teresa Shawcross is Assistant Professor at Amherst and Mt Holyoke College. Her recent research has been concerned with the eastern Mediterranean world of the late medieval period, with publications focusing on aspects of the social and cultural history of the Crusader States and the Byzantine Empire. Her book The Chronicle of Morea: Historiography in Crusader Greece was published in 2009.
NicoleĴe S. Trahoulia received her PhD in Art History from Harvard University. She is currently Professor of Art History at the American College of Greece. A major focus of her work has been to examine the role of art in expressing imperial ideology in the middle to late Byzantine period. She has done extensive research on the various manifestations of Alexander the Great in Byzantine times. Her present research examines the relationship of the visual arts to the literary genre of romance from the tenth to the twelĞh centuries.
Konstantinos Zafeiris has taught in the Department of Mediaeval History at the University of St Andrews and as a temporary lecturer in the Institute of Byzantine Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He received his PhD from the University of St Andrews, for a dissertation entitled ‘The Synopsis Chronike and its place in the Byzantine chronicle tradition: its sources (Creation–1081 CE)’, and he is currently working on expanding his research on the text, and on Byzantine chronicle writing.
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